Danse Macabre   ::   Кинг Стивен

We'll have more to say about monstrosity as we go along, and hopefully something of a more profound nature than is contained in the ore we can mine from I Was a Teenage Werewolf and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein , but I think it's important first to establish the fact that, even on their simplest level, these Tales of the Hook do a number of things without even trying to. Allegory and catharsis are both provided, but only because the creator of horror fiction is above all else an agent of the norm.

This is true of horror's more physical side, and we'll find it's also true of works which are more consciously artistic, although when we turn our discussion to the mythic qualities of horror and terror, we may find some rather more disturbing and puzzling associations. But to reach that point, we need to turn our discussion away from film, at least for awhile, and to three novels which form most of the base on which the modern horror genre stands.



CHAPTER III

Tales of the Tarot

ONE OF THE most common themes in fantastic literature is that of immortality. "The thing that would not die" has been a staple of the field from Beowulf to Poe's tales of M. Valdemar and of the telltale heart, to the works of Lovecraft (such as "Cool Air"), Blatty, and even, God save us, John Saul.

The three novels I want to discuss in this chapter seem to have actually achieved that immortality, and I believe it's impossible to discuss horror in the years 1950-1980 with any real fullness of understanding unless we begin with these three books. All three live a kind of half-life outside the bright circle of English literature's acknowledged "classics," and perhaps with good reason. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was written at white heat by Robert Louis Stevenson in three days. It so horrified his wife that Stevenson burned the manuscript in his fireplace . . . and then wrote it again from scratch in another three days. Dracula is a frankly palpitating melodrama couched in the frame of the epistolary novel-a convention that had been breathing its last gasps twenty years before when Wilkie Collins was writing the last of his great mystery/suspense novels. Frankenstein, the most notorious of the three, was penned by a nineteen-year-old girl, and although it is the best written of the three, it is the least read, and its author would never again write so quickly, so well, so successfully . . . or so audaciously.

In the most unkind of critical lights, all three can be seen as no more than popular novels of their day, with little to distinguish them from novels roughly similar-The Monk, by M. G. Lewis, for instance, or Collins's Armadale-books largely forgotten except by teachers of Gothic fiction who occasionally pass them on to students, who approach them warily . . . and then gulp them down.

But these three are something special.